Secretary of State John Kerry arrives for a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on July 19, 2013, in the West Bank city of Ramallah. / FADI AROURI AFP/Getty Images

by Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY

by Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON - In the lead-up to the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on Monday night, Secretary of State John Kerry knows that the odds of him failing - as a long list of his predecessors have over the years - remain high.

Hours before negotiators from both sides were set to sit down with him for dinner in Washington, Kerry told reporters that the process would be difficult and the road ahead was filled with pitfalls. But nudging the two sides back to the negotiation table, Kerry suggested, was the only real choice.

"I know the negotiations are going to be tough, but I also know that the consequences of not trying could be worse," Kerry said.

President Obama - who made securing a peace deal a top foreign policy early in his first term only to have the effort fail - has handed the ball to Kerry. And in the months since Kerry was sworn in at State, there's perhaps no issue that America's top diplomat has thrown more energy into than reviving peace talks.

Most notably, Kerry has shuttled to the region a half-dozen times, raising some eyebrows in Washington over whether in his dogged pursuit of restarting the peace process - which Middle East analysts nearly unanimously agree has little chance of success - he's ignored more urgent problems such as civil war in Syria and the tumult in Egypt since President Mohammed Morsi's ouster earlier this month.

But in a strange twist, it is the chaos elsewhere in the Middle East that has helped Kerry quietly restart the talks, says Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former Middle East negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations.

Syria, mired in internecine fighting that has killed 100,000, is no place to meddle. Another perennial regional spoiler, the Muslim Brotherhood, is occupied with the fallout of being ousted from power in Egypt less than a year after winning elections. And the Egyptian military has been closing many of the tunnels through which Hamas smuggled weapons into Gaza.

"There is this strange quiet that is in Israel and Palestine right now, while everything else in the region seems to be falling apart," Miller said. "That has, strangely enough, created some time and space for this to happen."

Kerry also has worked some diplomatic magic to get to this point.

He's persuaded the Arab League to go along with a potential scenario where Israel and the Palestinians could trade land rather than conform exactly to their 1967 borders in what appears to be a softening of Arab states' stance on the 2002 peace plan. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week agreed to release more than 100 Palestinian prisoners arrested before the Oslo Agreement more than 20 years ago as a confidence-building measure.

But the return to talks should not be viewed as a transformative moment in itself, warns Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. Polls in recent years have shown that both Arabs and Israelis are skeptical that a two-state solution remains a possible endgame to the more than 60-year-old problem. And on the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian leaders remain far apart.

On the campaign trail last year, Obama acknowledged his disappointment in the failure of the peace process in his first term and his dismay with Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who the president said have "got to want it as well."

The president has, at least publicly, kept an arms length from the peace effort during his second term, with a couple of exceptions.

In his March visit to Israel, Obama told a young Israeli audience that he still thought peace was possible and necessary. On Monday, as talks were set to resume, Obama offered guarded optimism in a statement that the new talks would be fruitful.

For now, this current push for peace is John Kerry's show. But at a certain point, certainly if the effort gains any traction, Kerry will have to hand the ball back to Obama.

"The real question â?¦ in the end, it's not about a special envoy or the secretary of State," Telhami said. "It's about whether the president wants to make this a priority issue, which means he has to go to bat at home and abroad."